[cairo] rookie question

[Carl Worth]

On Tue, 5 Feb 2008 03:45:26 -0800 (PST), abi wrote:
> What is the difference between cairo , directfb , opengl ?

I'm afraid that questions a bit too broad for me to attempt any answer
here on the mailing list. Is there something more specific that you're
looking to answer?

> Where does the cairo fit in the x server system ?

This one's easier to address. The most typical usage of cairo with the
X Window System is that cairo provides an easy-to-use drawing API that
gives the application access to the X Render extension. So an
application that uses cairo_xlib_surface_create[*], will then be using
X Render for all cairo drawing.

And within the X server, the Render extension can be implemented with
hardware acceleration. This can happen with EXA today, which provides
driver hooks to accelerate Render. There's still ongoing work to
improve the implementation of EXA-based drivers, (see the recent talk
that Eric and I gave at linux.conf.au for example). And there are
experimental efforts, (called glucose), to instead use OpenGL inside
the X server to implement Render.

I hope that helps a bit,

-Carl

[*] And a cairo-using GTK+ application targeting the X Window System
counts here.
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